The present invention relates to a lottery system utilizing an electronic mail, more particularly to a lottery system in which the results of the lottery system is interactively identifiable.
Recently, varieties of services have been provided on the Internet. FIG. 1 shows one diagram of a configuration of the present invention using the Internet. A plurality of users 112 and 114 may access to a server 120 connected to the Internet 101 by, for example, a browser. Thus the users 112, 114 may utilize services provided by the server 120. One of the services available in the Internet is a lottery service wherein prizes are awarded to winners by a host server 122. Explanatory diagrams for this service are shown in FIGS. 2A and 2B.
With reference to a conventional prize competition using the Internet, a certain period of time was needed until the result of lottery was known after application by the participants 116. A conventional lottery system using the Internet is explained in FIG. 2A. The prize competition of the lottery system is not limited to the one on the Internet. However, the prizes are generally awarded to a predetermined number of winners chosen among participants 116 who had applied for a lottery for a period of time. As shown in FIG. 2A, at t1, a host 122 calls for participants 116 by announcing details of winning parties including number and contents of awards. Then participants 116 apply for the awards, as shown in the solid arrows, until t2 when the host 122 announces the closing of the entries. Subsequently, the host 122 makes a selection and announces the winners of the lottery, as shown in the broken line arrow. In this conventional method, the participants 116 could not know who won the prizes for a certain period of time. In the conventional method, many people hesitated to participate in the prize competition because of the time consuming process.
Further under this conventional method, it was difficult for the host 122 or server to limit number of participants 116, particularly in the case of an Internet lottery. This problem is explained in reference to FIG. 2B. As shown in FIG. 2B, any Internet user may access to a lottery home page or web site 124 and may basically participate in the prize competition specified in the web site 124. Each of the participants 116 enters specific data requested into the database 126 which constitutes a main group. A host 122 of the prize competition could not manipulate or control the attributes of the main group database 126, because the database 126 was not well organized. Therefore the database of the main group thus constituted was not necessarily effective for the operation of the Internet lottery.